Mikey Rukus On Combining His Love Of Wrestling & Music In AEW, How He Came On Board

Mikey Rukus serves as AEW’s music producer, and he recently discussed grewing up as a wrestling fan and how he combined his love of music and wrestling into a career. Rukus spoke with PWInsider for a new interview promoting the release of AEW: Symphony Series II, and you can check out a couple of highlights below:

On whether music or wrestling was his first passion: “It was absolutely wrestling first. I want to say that my very first image of wrestling was probably in early 1980. I remember seeing Boogie Woogie Man Jimmy Valiant and my mom was a huge wrestling fan when I was a kid. My dad was into it too. My mom was even a bigger fan than my dad was. I remember early images of Jimmy Snuka diving off the top of the steel cage on to Don Muraco like 83 and it was very prominent at our house and it just stayed with me throughout the years. I discovered music around 89. My very first concert was the Metallica “And Justice For All” tour and saw them at the Richmond Coliseum. The cold open for them when Matt Sorum was playing drums for them before he joined Guns N’ Roses. I actually met them that night, my very first show, I was completely spoiled. And thought that every rock concert was supposed to be as good as this one. But it actually, it changed my life in terms of wanting to write music. But yeah, wrestling was absolutely the genesis of all of it.”

On how his love of music and wrestling combined into one: “Well actually it was born out of the need of supplemental income right around 2010. I was looking at trying to…I was trying to bring in additional income and I was writing music but I was not very good at it. I was kind of okay at it. But I just kind of made the conscious decision that I was going to do music for money. And I was playing in a couple of cover bands in our local scene and making some money there but I really wanted to kind of build on the production side and at the time WWE was still very prominent and they were like the number one in that whole music scene. So I turned and looked at the mixed martial arts scene and just decided that I was going to start from scratch. I was going to hit up indy and amateur mixed martial arts fighters from a local scene, the regional scene, and it just kind of snowballed from there to different websites asking for music and podcasts asking for intro music. Within a year and a half of that taking place, in like mid-2010, I had my music being featured in the UFC. UFC 142 was the first time I had my music featured in a larger scale setting. And then it continued to snowball from there. I was always a big proponent of networking and virtually shaking hands, almost borderline spamming people at some point. So I learned what to do, what not to do. I learned how to approach people, how not to approach people, and all in the interest of survival.

“Then in 2016, somewhere around there, I saw a shift in the independent wrestling scene. There was a huge boom. I saw a lot of the professional wrestlers actually taking their own brands into their own hands and using, utilizing social media to carry themselves from one territory to another, one promotion to another. And I just decided I was going to shift and transition over as the MMA thing kind of dried up a little bit and just completely start over again. I said if I could do this in mixed martial arts, I couldn’t do this professional wrestling. Not even knowing that anything was going on with AEW, they weren’t even a concept or anything like that. So between 2016 and late 2018 I created over 250 entrance themes for independent professional wrestlers in the US and the UK, in Germany and just kind of branched out that way, created a name again. And in early 2019, I saw the announcement of AEW, I just felt like it was my time. I felt like – this was it. And the entire time I was working as a retail manager for various big box and small box, retail stores and things like that. So I stayed full time and built that up on the side. And even when I joined AEW in May of 2019 I stayed in my retail setting just until like, maybe the beginning of August. Right before we went to TV and launched AEW Dynamite. So it was always something that I always tried to work for. I didn’t know that the end was going to be AEW. It wasn’t even a concept at the time but it was just…it was a building of networking and staying consistent and delivering and always trying to work to the next thing. And that’s how you create your opportunity. A little bit of luck, a little bit of timing and a whole lot of consistency.”

On coming on board with AEW: “Yeah, so it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty interesting how the whole thing came about because first of all, I had no connections with anyone in the company like I had no previous friendships, no previous business engagements or anything like that. So nobody knew me coming in. And you know, when I initially saw a tweet go out from Dustin Rhodes talking about how proud he was of his brother. And I went and looked that up and saw what Cody was talking about the announcement of AEW and that’s when I started to do the research. And I tried to go the route of networking just like that, you know, I always would, I couldn’t really figure out a way to get in touch with anybody. And then just kind of out of the blue. It’s almost like, you know, like, a secret person walks up and hands you a note and sticks it in your pocket like go five paces this way and go two miles this way and you’re gonna find a secret door and you open it. It was literally like that. So someone gave me the number to QT Marshall. I texted him, we had a text exchange, he called me and then he set up a call and I had my next call was with Brandi Rhodes. My next call was with Chris Harrington and it literally started with an audition, an audition theme and that first theme was Nyla Rose’s Beast song theme. I created that in 24 hours just to show them that I can perform, I can perform quickly, I can deliver consistently and then there was some a little bit of back and forth on okay, what are rates, how many can you do and things like that and I just kind of floated the idea like look, you’re going to need music all the time. So how about I just work here forever. And I’m paraphrasing of course, but that’s how it actually came to be and Chris Harrington called me up and said we’d like to bring you on the team and the rest is kind of history after that.”